Speaking Freely

The Social Web ChaCha – Dancing For Dollars – Dot Doom 2.0

No less than seven people I have spoken to in the last two days have commented on the ‘Social Web Boom’. For some reason I have this nagging feeling that dot doom 2.0 is on the way. Let’s take a look at some of the recent news.

Yahoo buys MyBlogLog for ten million. Just yesterday, Chris Winfield at 10e20 was asking how long until spam becomes a huge problem for MyBlogLog? Granted MyBlogLog is growing quickly. It’s got that ‘oh neat’ appeal but it doesn’t have that ‘oh wow!” factor. It’s a little gimmicky, and frankly, it takes too many clicks to get around once you’re there. Chris mentioned the privacy issue and I think he’s correct. People will stop being so casual about the information they post there. If you’re looking to find blog networks, I recommend starting at MyBlogLog.

I’ve used ChaCha a couple of times and found it ultimately pointless. When I’ve got a choice of banging a few keywords into Google and getting a result in a second, or going on ChaCha, waiting for a connection, typing a question, waiting for an answer… I’ll take Google any day.

Then there’s the MySPace clones, MySpace For Moms, MySpace for Men in Tights and Myspace for Tibetan Goat Farmers. And the Digg clones, Flickr clones, an entire horde of tagging sites, and don’t forget tag aggregators like Tagbulb.

Why do I get the impression some suit has $250 million dollars to spend and the rollup strategy contains only a single directive. ‘If it’s Web 2.0, buy it‘. Not to mention all the VCs following a similar directive in order to cash in on the cash cow that’s called Web 2.0, and the monetization strategy is probably nothing more than, ‘just buy it, we’ll figure out a way to monetize it later’.

Or did the 1.65 billion dollar purchase of YouTube by Google simply put fear into the hearts of every investor out there looking to cash in on the Web? The idea being that it’s business suicide to allow Google to be the leader in search and lead the Web 2.0 New World Order?

In any event, there’s some serious cash being thrown at Web 2.0 and I see very few sound strategies behind all the cash.